Data Sheet

Brotherton’s Travels : Memoirs
by Greg Boyd

Publication Date: May 20, 2025  |  LCCN: 2024949935 | 570 pp.

Paperback:   $34.95 USD  |  ISBN 978-1-58775-054-0
E-Book:     $9.99 USD  |  ISBN 978-1-58775-055-7

About the Book | About the Author | Praise

About the Book

Equal parts travelogue, cultural study, and picaresque autobiography, Brotherton’s Travels is an offbeat, probing, and insightful book that challenges conventional perceptions. Having lived and worked in the United States, as well as in France, Ecuador and Spain, Greg Boyd, a visual artist known as well for his experimental fiction, brings a border-crossing sensibility to his memoirs. Raised and educated in traditional upstate New York during the early 1960s, then in the free-wheeling culture of 70s Southern California, Boyd’s unusual upbringing resulted in a highly developed sense of irony. Whether telling the story of his mysterious Brotherton ancestors or describing his experiences in small press publishing, teaching, and the arts, Boyd pulls back the curtain to reveal the absurdity hiding in plain sight. Having left Paradise, California prior to the conflagration that wiped it off the map, he remembers a town that no longer exists. Having grown up near the site of a series of nuclear accidents at the Santa Susana Research Laboratory in the city of Los Angeles, he now lives in the Spanish town on which the U.S. Air Force in 1966 dropped a hand-full of nuclear warheads, after a patrolling B-52 collided with a refueling plane over the Mediterranean. Whether describing conversations with a wandering peddler of psychedelics, a body-piercing expert, or a victim of serial alien abductions, or describing what it’s like to catch a wave as a surfer, visit a purveyor of Confederate memorabilia, teach classes in Taekwondo, or be an expat in Ecuador and Spain, Boyd’s memoirs are always entertaining, enlightening, and full of the inventiveness and explosiveness critics have praised in his fiction. The book concludes with “Planet Hazmat,” an alternative autobiographical narrative that examines the effects of environmental and cultural toxicity.

Advance Praise

Greg Boyd is, like his great-great grandfather, “a handsome, bold, and entertaining fellow.” Moreover, a headbanger of the first order, Boyd was Baudelaire in the battle scarred San Fernando Valley when the Left Coast renaissance was in its mid-century infancy. Boyd’s memoir Brotherton’s Travels recounts what earthlings now realize was the halcyon age of the boho California coup de foudre. Reading Greg Boyd’s work makes me want to wave my hands and pound on the table. I can’t get caught inside without him.

— Susie Bright, author of Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir

Spanning three continents and half a century, Brotherton’s Travels is the story of life on the edge, the proverbial struggle to make art matter in a world that works against it. Greg Boyd’s work with Asylum Arts Press was nothing short of heroic, a lifeline for hundreds of innovative writers. But beyond that, Boyd’s carefully crafted memoir is a portrait of a man unwilling to settle for a dull existence. As a poet, fiction-writer, editor, teacher, and visual artist, Boyd was an ongoing source of inspiration to people he worked with. And it’s fitting that his memoir ends with “Planet Hazmat,” a stunning and insightful condemnation of the socio-economic forces that are turning our planet into a toxic waste land. Though Greg Boyd has a great absurdist sense of humor Brotherton’s Travels is not light reading. Instead, it’s a book to read carefully, a book to savor and learn from.

— Stephen-Paul Martin, author of TwentyTwenty and The Ace of Lightning

If you’re into contemporary literature and small press publishing, this splendid memoir is for you. In Brotherton’s Travels, author and visual artist Greg Boyd details what it takes to swim against the current as a writer and publisher of avant-garde literature in America. I hope he’s found his asylum at last.

— Paul Rosheim, editor and publisher of Obscure Publications

Greg Boyd’s Brotherton’s Travels is so rich in details, personal histories, literary reminisces, and chronicles of Boyd’s often dysfunctional family that to write about it one must bring both one’s intellect and imagination to the task. One should start, of course, by dealing with Boyd’s claim that his memoir isn’t even about him, but instead concerns his alter-ego, whom he names Brotherton. In a sense, the creation of an alter-ego allows him to look objectively at his real self, which, in turn, frees him from the self-indulgent psychic bloodletting that characterizes most memoirs.

Using short sections of clear yet musical prose, Boyd creates a memoir that ends up being a page-turner. But what really makes this memoir special is Boyd’s authentic voice, one whose hopefulness constantly battles with his clear-eyed disappointment in the human condition. This contrast is most evident in the two endings the book offers: one at the end of the penultimate chapter, the other which closes the book and presents a possible apocalyptic vision of the future. Being familiar with Boyd’s work and sensibility, I lean toward the former ending. There, while at home in Spain, Boyd describes how, after he and his wife Donna awaken from a nap, she points to a little sailboat moving across the ocean—an image reminding Boyd of a tiny red, plastic sailboat he owned as a child, a memory that makes him “recall a dream in which [he] once caught a glimpse of eternity.” This “glimpse,” so often gifted to us through imagery, is what makes life worth living. It’s one of those archetypal moments Boyd has always doggedly pursued in his life and work—one that we all crave.

Perhaps Boyd states this communal experience best when explaining the etymology of his alter-ego. “Call me Brotherton,” he proclaims, “for we are all brothers, and for better or worse, this world we inhabit together is both our tribe and our town.” In this sense, Brotherton’s Travels, like all great memoirs, is as much our story as it is Greg Boyd’s.

— Peter Johnson, winner of the James Laughlin Award and author of While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems